MCU on Eclipse

On a lifelong learning journey …

Building a Raspberry Pi UPS and Serial Login Console with tinyK22 (NXP K22FN512)

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Erich Styger

There are different ways to ruin a Linux system. For the Raspberry Pi which uses a micro SD card as the storage device by default, it comes with two challenges:

Excessive writes to the SD card can wear it out
Sudden power failure during a SD card write can corrupt the file system

For problem one I do I have a mitigation strategy (see “Log2Ram: Extending SD Card Lifetime for Raspberry Pi LoRaWAN Gateway“). Problem two can occur by user error (“you shall not turn it off without a sudo poweroff!”) or with the event of a power outage or black out. So for that problem I wanted to build a UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi with UPS System and tinyK22

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TrustZone with ARMv8-M and the NXP LPC55S69-EVK

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Erich Styger

The ARM TrustZone is an optional security feature for Cortex-M33 which shall improve the security for embedded applications running on microcontroller as the NXP LPC55S69 (dual-core M33) on the LPC55S69-EVK.

NXP LPC55S69-EVK Board

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First Steps with the LPC55S69-EVK (Dual-Core ARM Cortex-M33 with Trustzone)

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Erich Styger

For the long Easter weekend I have organized a new toy: the NXP LPC55S69-EVK board: a dual ARM Cortex-M33 running at 100 MHz with ARM TrustZone:

LPC55S69 Microcontroller

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 2: Commandline Debugging with GDB

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Erich Styger

In “Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Maked” I used cmake and make to build the SDK application. In this part I’m going to use the command line gdb to debug the application on the board.

Cross-Debugging with GDB

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 1: Installation and Build with Make

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Erich Styger

I admit: my work laptop machine is running a Windows 10 OS by default. But this does not prevent me running Linux in a Virtual Machine (VM). Each host platform has its benefits, and I don’t feel biased to one or the other, but I have started using Ubuntu more and more, simply because I have worked more on Embedded Linux projects. While I have used mostly Windows with Eclipse for NXP LPC, Kinetis and i.MX platforms in the past, I started using Ubuntu too from last year with the NXP MCUXpresso SDK. I did not find much documentation about this on the web, so I thought it might be a good idea to write a tutorial about it. So here we go…

Building NXP MCUXpresso SDK on Linux Ubuntu

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Debugging the RV32M1-VEGA RISC-V with Eclipse and MCUXpresso IDE

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Erich Styger

The ARM Cortex cores are everywhere. I like (and use) them a lot. Don’t take me wrong: maybe ARM needs some competition? It is very refreshing to see that something new is getting a lot of attention: RISC-V!

RV32M1 (VEGA)

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Tutorial: Changing ARM Cortex Core or Microcontroller in Eclipse CDT Projects

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Erich Styger

Sometimes I start a project with an ARM microcontroller, and in the middle of the project I find out that it was a wrong choice at the beginning and I need to switch the microcontroller derivative or even the used ARM core. With little knowledge of the project structure and the files needed, such a switch is not the easiest thing, but definitely possible.

switching cores

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Driver and Command Line Shell for Winbond W25Q128 16MByte Serial FLASH Device

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Erich Styger

Modern microcontroller come with plenty of internal FLASH memory. On the other side, many high performance MCUs as the NXP i.MX RT are ‘flashless’, because the silicon process for high performance cores is not matching the FLASH memory technology, so they are using external serial SPI or Quad-SPI (QSPI) memory instead.

Winbond w25q128 Serial Flash Breakout Board

Why not using an external SPI FLASH for a ‘normal’ microcontroller too?

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New NXP MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.0 Release

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Erich Styger

Friday this week NXP has released a new version of their flagship IDE: the MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.0. The version number indicates an incremental update from the earlier V10.2.1, but there are many exciting features and new features which make me switch my lecture material to this new IDE for the next semester.

MCUXpresso IDE V10.3.0

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McuOnEclipse Components: 30-Sept-2018 Release

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Erich Styger

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the McuOnEclipse components, available on SourceForge. This release includes several bug fixes, extra support for the NXP S32 Design Studio and SDK and includes FreeRTOS V10.1.1.

SourceForge